♺ The Sex Garage (1972 Fred Halsted)

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The black-and-white Sex Garage, released the same year [as LA Plays Itself], is a marginally more focused work, though by conventional standards its far from a classical narrative. It opens with a hardcore hetero scene  a sexy young guy getting head from an enthusiastic woman. Surrounded by cars and car paraphernalia, they fuck furiously on the concrete floor of the title space. But the guy turns out to be bisexual, and graciously accepts the services of a knob-polishing queen who serendipitously moseys in. As in other Halsted films  and recalling the entropic atmosphere of early Warhol movies  here the characters come and go at random. Theres no attempt to create characterizations  in the demimonde of the sex garage there are no people, just random fetishes, body parts, and desires enacted and forgotten.

Sex Garage has its share of lurid encounters, but the most prescient one is reminiscent of  and surely outstrips  both Kenneth Angers bike fetish and the car-fuck crazies of Cronenbergs Crash. A bored hunk arrives; tired of getting head from the wandering suckboy, he goes for some real action and mates with the exhaust pipe of his motorcycle in clinical close-up. This film was banned in New York at the time because the police believed it was promoting obscenity. Apparently they didnt appreciate the peculiar modernity of this scene as a parable of humankind, so often overwhelmed by technology, connecting with cold steel in a way hitherto unimagined. The fact that the overcooked Crash had similar censorship problems around the same time (mid-1990s) that Halsteds films spilled back into select repertory venues shows how far we hadnt come.